Friday, October 29, 2010

Mathew Burke from GWU says GWU has an adjunct led course in FOSS 8-10 students per session, but argues to spread it across the curriculum. Audience member argues for the single course approach for depth. Burke replies that in the case for Ethics students think they are "done" with Ethics after the course. Burke says perhaps the ethics angle is tangential and in the case of FOSS the issues can be integral across the computing disciplines. Topics like rights, developer communication, across courses, can look at history, etc. There are lots of places it can be fitted in without having to devote resources to a specific course. Look at unit testing, support tools, shared editing and can add those tools to classes that do software dev.
Low hanging fruit is submitting homework using version control systems. Benefits are...
1. they should be using version control and refusing to grade it unless its in there motivates them
2. indicates how willing students are to dive in to something new

Audience member adds in its a good block to plagiarism, but why does it have to be FOSS
Matt says because That's what the panel is about.

3. Also useful to develop distributed work and development skills.
4. Opportunity to get students involved extracurricularly. Cites GSOC as a good way to put classroom knowledge into practice and networking with other developers.

How do you decide what to deal with? two categories...

A. Students look at code but don't join dev communities. Look at actual, working code in DBs, large scale projects, etc. Spinella says we don't expect people to learn how to write without teaching them to read, we should do the same with code.

B. Get them involved in a project and have them get involved in large scale development, what its like to work with large groups all over the world working on the same project

Heidi on her involvement in FOSS

Had a student leave the country and get involved in Sahana. The former student encouraged them to get involved. Found two students on independent study and got involved in Sahana to find out what the barriers might be and whether it would work for students. The two students were successful and they had three more students get involved over the summer. By the send of the summer they were able to demo a volunteer management module for Sahana they built actively participating in disaster management sessions.

So FOSS began getting integrated into the class with successful students as mentors. Have added Open MRS, medical records system, Ronald Macdonald House Volunteer scheduling, Hartford Public Library and Gnome Caribou Onscreen desktop better. HFOSS projects want student involvement.

Grading can be an issue. Since's there's no guarantee of a "finished project" must grade on student working on process.

Cliff discusses projects and communities. Size of teams can vary from 2-3 people to hundreds. Second is how centralized the project is. Some academic FOSS projects or commercial FOSS projects have on major team doing most of the work with some fringe external developers. Others are fully distributed.

1st they are users
2nd they study how the FOSS SW works
3rd Add minor enhancements
4th build significant components
5th Leverage to solve other problems

So like Matt said they learn to read before they write. Then they make minor improvements

Greg Hilsop Instructor Perspective

This is not a trivial undertaking for an instructor to get into it but its really rewarding. If you like to run project courses this stuff can be a gold mine. Some cost of Entry but really high reward. You gotta gear yourself up. Not a lot of faculty to work with. You need to take time to learn the culture and how it works.

Some undependability with people joining and leaving projects, etc so you give up some control
Some sources for instructors.

teachingopensource.org for community of peers and practice
POSSE, boot camp for Profs
fosslc.org FOSS Learning Center
softhum is a spin-off of fosslc

Much of academia is about getting together face to face and one problem is difficult to figure out the structures and networks and community.

Open source is also about community. What are the differences?

Academic communities very structured and formal, well defined procedures and hierarchies.
Open Source communities are the opposite Do you know how to get somewhere or do you know where you want to get

OS communities are terrible at scaffolding.

Sebastian talks about Matt Jaduad immersing students in Open Source. People in Open Source communities are always looking for help. Students are attractive as they're likely to be consistent members for at least the time of their classes.

Mel says students and professors don't have to be skilled but they have to be willing to learn. FOSS communities also like students because they know there'll be profs or other sources of support on-site beyond the distributed dev community. IF you're in school you have a process, but you may not know what the product will be. In FOSS you have a product but you don't know what the process will be.

Academics expect all the pieces for support within FOSS projects that are supposed to be there should be there. FOSS communities know that it's likely big pieces of those documents are missing.

FOSS does provide the opportunity for an apprenticeship style of learning and growth.

Q and A time

Audience: Something that didn't get covered was IP, I don't tell them about Open Source.

Heidi says yes it's an issue. Some people ignore it, some people say it's licensed
Stephen Jacobs says it's a mix. Students own their homework
Audience member says Since his university says students own their thesis, so he says they should own their homework.
Greg says his institution agrees with RIT
Audience member says European Universities are different
Mel says the Humanitarian issue is also useful for HFOSS projects as a block to university IP issues.
Heidi says the issue is lurking. Involving students in Open Source is evolving
Audience member says at the HFOSS symposium some Universities are officially creating policies to address this. It's a slow process and must involve faculty senate and other groups. Faculty have to be determined to make the change.
Audience member says may be different at state universities as the IP may be owned by the state. For people in those situations they might want to work with their university technology offices before the class is offered
audience member says don't ask, don't tell

New comment. There's a lot of overhead in doing things across the curriculum. Getting faculty up to speed, getting students into the culture of the specific project, especially if its peripheral
Greg Depends on the students. I do FOSS field trips. I ask DO you use Mozilla, etc? They say yes, but they don't know how those products emerge. So I'll give them a list of projects and observe how the dev communities work. Lots of ways to show them
Mel says there's the overhead of getting faculty involved, POSSE can help with that. That helps with the first one. With the second one Red Hat's release cycle is 6 months so we're good at getting people up to speed rapidly.
Greg says it's kinda like looking your second and third programming language. You can also scaffold things. If you pick a task and being the interface in-between they don't have to get deeply immersed
Heidi says we're adding keyboards to an open source application. Its in python, we don't know python, but the keyboards are in XML and we know XML.
Matt says I do a lot of consulting as a software developer and you need to develop the skills to start working quickly in something you've never seen. You don't want to set students up to fail all the time but some of these barriers are not only a downside.
Greg agrees and says picking your projects carefully is important
Mel says watching a prof get lost in the beginning of a project with you is also instructive.

How variant are the methods of working with the communities. Do most of them use the same basics? Do you have communities you'd recommend that folks get started in?

Clif. No ones done an ethnographic study but I like getting them involved in things like the content management systems where they can get involved with modules and projects
heidi. I have them look at the communications first and and find the list serve, meetings, etc.
Plugs TOS Textbook. It's evolving but has small projects around many of these issues.
Matt points to Mel's post on Teaching Open Source in going through a community and she went through it.
Greg points to the FOSS Field Trip concept.

Audience member is trying to survey FOSS Managers. efg@ncsu.edu If you'd like to cooperate with me on that survey please get in touch. I have a Jan 1 Deadline. Would also like to cooperate on software for managing open source projects in classes

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

All kindsa stuff going on! Due to the previous press release on our students working on Wikiotics, we got a request to demo the project at the opening of Taylor and Nate got to show off Wikiotics at the grand opening of the Constellation Commons for Global Learning at RIT this Friday, October 23rd. Taylor and Nate did us all proud showing the tech off at this event.

Saturday was the third time we did the day-long "Games for Life" interest program workshop for the Girl Scouts, the same one we did at SIGGRAPH this past August. We'll be doing another this spring and after that I think the bugs will be worked out enough to distribute as open content, assuming the Girl Scouts agree.

What an excellent group of folks! Lots of synergy, lots of excitement and a whole list of brainstormed opportunities to collaborate on summer workshops, courses and more. It's clear we'll be getting back in touch soon to see what we can do together.

More traveling tomorrow, as I head off to Washington DC for the Frontiers in Education conference with some of the other TOS folks. Looking forward to meeting them face-to-face.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Looking forward to next week's road trip. Heading out on Wednesday to meet Pace University's David Sachs , the Associate Dean of the CS school there and recently minted PhD Gerald Ardito to talk about what's been going on at RIT and how we might help them get something similar started out there. After spending a few hours at Pace, Gerald and I will hop in his wheels and head down to see the Croton XO program.

Which is part of the larger session, "Service-Learning Models, Motivations, and Outcomes"

Then, since I'll be in DC I'll be catching up with my old chums, hitting the "Rally to Restore Sanity" and Trick-or-Treating with the four-year-old nephew and two-year-old niece. Absolutely the best part of the trip :-)

FOSS@RIT initiative aims to connect students with humanitarian-related projects

Monday, October 18, 2010

For those of you not in education and games, Unity is a high-end software package for creating3D and 2D games. For those of you into Open Source, while Unity is not an Open Source platform, it is developing a "publish to Android" version. The tool is also one of those that has a version that is free to use with some limits to functionality. more details on the software overall can be found at the Unity 3d site and on the various versions under their license page.

They are running a contest to encourage schools to start teaching development of mobile games and apps. Schools had to submit a proposal for a course they would develop using the tool. Twenty schools that win the first round (including us) get a full version of the software and an ANdroid phone to use to develop sample courseware. Those 20 schools submit their samples in roughly two months after they receive the package. Three of the 20 will win 20 copies of the full version and 20 phones to complete development of and offer the course.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

The joint was jumping last week, no question about it. First, Mel Chua dropped in to town to close a couple of loops and open new ones. The RIT paperwork for setting up the next POSSE, was completed.

The current penciled-in plan is to set it for June 20-24 and have Chris Tyler and Dave Shein teach it. Should be a blast. Our information session on RIT's campus drew about 12 interested faculty and staff from CS, Networking, Telecom, Computer and Electircal Engineering, Liberal Arts, the Library, and several related departments from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Another 12 sent their regrets due to time conflicts but asked to be notified when registration opens, so we should have a good pool again.

FOSSCon has their "Save The Date" on-line for June 25th, to follow POSSE in Rochester again. Mel and I did some brainstorming around another event for college student FOSS contributors at RIT to overlap both POSSE and FOSSCon. This one's to early stage to even be penciled-in yet, it's barely on the white board :-) There's likely be more about this if it looks like we can move forward and we'll be looking for input on it.

Mel and I also did some scheduling around the Teaching Open Source efforts for the

IEEE's Frontiers in Education Conference coming up in just 10 days. There a Teaching Open Source panel on Friday at 10 am starring Heidi J. C. Ellis, Gregory W. Hislop, Mel, Clif Kussmaul and Matthew M. Burke. I'll be heckling from the audience. I've got a "Work-in_Progress" paper (short and communicating experience vs. research) on the RIT efforts in a session on "Service-Learning Models, Motivations, and Outcomes" at 4:00 on Friday. We'll all be getting together, ideally with other kindred spirits, for dinner the night before and perhaps for more eating and greeting at lunch or dinner on Friday as well.

While Mel was on campus, I got the news that my paper on the student's OLPC game development efforts had been accepted for the IEEE Games Innovation Conference in December and I have the Teaching Open Source POSSE Alumni fund to thank for funding the travel to Hong Kong to deliver the paper. One of our graduate students, Emma Liao, was planning to return home to China for Christmas break so she will be accompanying me to GIC and the Asia Games Show to help me dridge linguistic difficulties that may arise. Thanks to Liz Lawley's Lab for Social Computing for covering Emma's registration costs.

The RIT class had their second presentation meeting to the Rochester Pythonistas. It is reported a good time was had by all, but I had to miss it :-( Our students Nate and Taylor got a shout out from Wikiotics on the work they are doing and RIT should have a related press release out this week as well.

If that's not enough, we had a great visit from the Michaels at Righteous Pictures, who did a presentation in the Center for Student Innovation on their films and making documentaries in the digital age. Their currently-in-post-production film, "Web" focuses on two related stories. One is on the impact of the Internet on human community, thought and behavior, and the second is on OLPC deployments in Peru and their impact on the kids and the villages who get them.

We're so happening that even the wildlife want in on the event. This bear was looking to join us in the FOSSBox but got lost on campus and never got to us.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Looks like great fun. Hope to get some students involved locally. Could do some stuff around OLPC and Sugar. Might be able to have them work on Math 4 projects RIT has started. Will need to check into it more.